Reading the Campus Culture in Five Point Someone, Above Average, and No Onions Nor Garlic

Pages:1-9
Averi Mukhopadhyay (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, Uttarakhand

“A novel, usually comic or satirical, in which the action is set within the enclosed world” of the academe “(university or similar set of learning) and highlights the follies of academic life”, is termed as ‘campus novel’ by Chris Baldick’s in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (33). Campus novel is a relatively new literary genre. Writings on universities and life within campuses existed but only as references in nineteenth century England in the works of the eminent Victorian novelists like Bulwer- Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, William Thackeray, Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy. Campus novels in the sense they are described above in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, originated in America with Mary Mc Carthy’s The Groves of Academe published in 1952. There was a surge in the production of campus novels as higher education increased rapidly in America and Britain after the end of the Second World War in 1945. Universities and colleges opened on a large scale and the objectives of these newly established educational institutes in both the countries, as Elaine Showalter has pointed out in Faculty Towers, were “first to absorb the returning veterans, and then to take in a larger and larger percentage of the baby- booming population” (1). “The famously overprotective parenting style of the baby boom generation”, remarks William Deresiewicz in his essay, “Love on Campus”, had in turn “put pressure on universities to revert to acting in loco parentis, forcing them to take on… paternalistic role” (42), and to create a complete society on the campus, with education, housing, meals, medical care, and social life all being provided communally and institutionally. As a result, close relations were also forged in such campuses between students and faculty, parents and administrator, lecturer and professor, male and female, Black and White, low caste and high caste. All these aspects inspired many, be it a student or a faculty member, to pen down their experiences in the campus.